Monday, September 27, 2010

I started my thesis work a few weeks ago! After three weeks of sketching and fiddling and fine-tuning and writing tons of episode ideas, I am almost ready to finalize my character designs.

What's that? You want to know what my thesis is about? WELL I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. I'm doing a pitch book for a kid's animated series, like something you'd see on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. It will include character designs, episode synopses, environment studies, and a little bit of promo art, all bound neatly into a delightful little booklet that can be given to art directors to pitch my idea. Along with this, since I am an animation concentrator, I will be doing some animations, either for the cut-to-commercials or for the opening theme song. COOL, HUH?

The show follows Ji-Young Kim (Ji) and her best friend Aiden Wier, the two best Guitar Hero players in the state, as they discover the video game Rock Band and create their own ragtag team of gamers to compete in the arcade's Rock Band Tournament. They meet their drummer, Mac McMurphy, and their vocalist, Rosalyn "Raz" Stimpson, through some very strange circumstances, and have to grow together to become the ULTIMATE VIDEO GAME BAND!

I started with the character designs, because without characters, where would an animation be? I did a ton of sketching, and when I had a good idea of the characters I did a test group illustration to test colors with. Here are a few that made it to the finals:

After a lot of helpful advice from my crit group and my thesis teacher, Whitney Sherman, I finalized the characters to theseeeeee:

Abby Boeh has lived her entire life in Maryland, which is probably as uneventful as it sounds. She then continued to live in Maryland, where she received her BFA in Illustration and Animation at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was in a couple of cool shows and won very few awards of note, but she did make a lot of friends and eat a considerable amount of ice cream. She has no idea what she is doing with her life.
She sleeps very little and likes dumb faces.